Once again I am happy to not be shoveling out from a massive winter storm, in this case one called Jonas. The latest named storm passed mostly east of us, leaving Happy Acres with a little snow on the ground but nothing too out of the ordinary for January. I will need to shovel out in front of the greenhouse so I can get in there, but that’s about all the shoveling I plan on doing.
snow from Jonas
The weather is supposed to warm up in a few days, and most of the snow should melt quickly. I’ll wait until then to open up the cold frames. Even the beehive doesn’t have much snow on it, and hopefully the bees are staying warm inside. They form a cluster this time of year, with the queen in the center so she stays warm. The temps are predicted to be up around 55°F by Saturday, so they may even be out flying then. They probably need to take what is delicately called a cleansing flight, since they do not poop in the hive! The Russian strain of bees we have should handle the cold weather just fine. Even though we didn’t get any honey from the new hive this year, they had plenty of honey stored for themselves for winter. The whole top box was full of honey when I did my last inspection back in October. We never take any honey from the bottom two boxes (deep supers).
bee hive
Inside our house, my six year old computer is in need of replacement. I powered it off the other day and the hard drive did NOT want to spin back up. I finally got it going, but that is never a good sign. Before I retired I served as Disaster Recovery Coordinator for many years, so you can rest assured that I have good (and current) backups of all my files! I even have ‘offsite’ backups, in this case residing in my workshop. When I was still working (at an aluminum plant) the auditors required us to have backups in multiple locations, so nearly every day I schlepped mag tapes out to a process control computer room for safekeeping. I usually walked, so it was good exercise, and occasionally the backups came in handy. These days I can fit much of my important stuff on a thumb drive, which is encrypted in case it gets lost or stolen. So I will be shopping for a new PC, which is not a bad thing to do on a cold snowy January day. Considering my years of dealing with various computer problems, you could say it is deja vu all over again!